Looking for pickup ideas from players

[Mastersound]

Hiya

I'd be interested to hear some ideas on pickups from players of emandos. To date I've mainly been using P-bass pickups in my mandos, but we've been trying to come up with a better pickup that's voiced for a mando. So far our experiments in squeezing in enough windings in that little space still don't make for a particularly hot pickup. I've been using Tele neck sized pickups in my larger scale ukes. There's a lot more room for windings with the Tele neck pickup so I'm looking to make up some emando and tenor guitar pickups of a similar style. We're also looking at some humbucker style pickups but aesthetically the bigger humbucker kind of overwhelms a little emando body!

What I'd like to find out is what sound you're looking for from your emando? Are you a twanger or a cruncher? Do you prefer a warmer sound from a pickup positioned closer to the neck or a more piercing sound from a pickup that's closer to the bridge? Do you prefer a clean sound or would you like a humbucker with some thicker dirtier sounds, or a split humbucker so you can select either to suit the mood?

Any and all ideas would be greatly appreciated!

[mandroid]

I'll add the consideration of RMC's in-the-bridgepiece piezos as opposed to, or additional to a magnetic coil. (you got a photo of my 'acousticGold' retrofit)
also solid body stratele and tunomat
Strat type fit well, placed askew, they fit better.
Bundled DSP pedals provide the tone variety for the most part..
EMG select, a stacked humbucker black strat sort, are well priced..


go to RMC pickups for nylon strings the proper Uke feel no steel substitute string can offer!

[Christian McKee]

I really like my two split humbuckers, but the output loss when I split them is starting to get to me. I may end up buying a cheaper single-coil instrument for songs that really want it. I like the warmth of a humbucker, and find that clean strings and good attention to tone controls really make up for the diminished clarity without too much compromise.

Christian

[jmkatcher]

I think a solution could be something like on older Peavey guitars. They have humbuckers with the tone wired to the coil splitter so there's a continuum from pure single to humbucker instead of simple on-off.

[thistle3585]

I am leaning more toward a dual blade humbucker that fits in a single coiul slot. I recently installed one for a friend of mine and it sounded great. His was made for guitar, so it was wider and needed to be installed on an angle to diminish the width. I thought about winding my own, but thats just one more thing that I don't have time to do.

[Mastersound]

Thanks for the feedback people! I'm working on some little Tele style bridges for concert, tenor and baritone ukes, these are based on a GFS blade style Tele neck pickup. I've made up a scaled down Tele bridge pickup with a 14mm string pitch for the longer scale ukes but really the output is similar to the P-bass pickups... there's just a limit to how much wire you can get into that small space! Similarly by the time we made up a test pickup with 10.5mm pole spacing for mandos, soprano ukes and tenor guitars there wasn't much output to get excited about. A stacked humbucker may be a solution but that's one for future experimentation. My market seems to have drifted from emandos to other instruments so I've shifted my focus for the time being, but I believe there's still a niche for development of emando hardware and pickups.

[Joel Glassman]

A Lawrence blade humbucker. It can be used without its
mounting ring, making the size smaller. I use one and the
sound is excellent. There are nasty sounding imitations
of this pickup though, so I'd buy from the web site.
http://www.billlawrence.com/Pages/Pickup_Window/500.htm

[Mastersound]

Thanks Joel

I take it they're standard humbucker size?

[Dfyngravity]

I use two Kent Armstrong Minibuckers on my Mann 5 string emando.

Here's a link to my Mann 5 String Mini PRS emando and you can see how they fit. They sound great too. But I would also think about what style amp you are using before selecting your pickups.

[Gowanus]

My 5-string Mandoblaster had a nice Kent Armstrong lipstick pickup in it. But I wanted to try something different and dropped in a Carvin twinblade humbucker. It's excellent, with a nice thick mid-range sound. And extremely reasonably priced. The twinblades fit right in the single coil slot, and with no pole pieces there's no problem with string alignment.